The problem, as Media Matters points out, is that the wording of the Rasmussen poll ("Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?") almost surely conflates people who believe Bush intentionally allowed an attack to occur with those who think the administration was negligent in its attention to the potential threat from Al Qaeda. Even National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg conceded this point in a column published soon after the poll was released.

There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.

When asked how likely this was, 16% of Americans said it was very likely and 20% said it was somewhat likely that people in the Bush administration "assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East."

The partisan breakdown was not provided in the Scripps news report on the poll, but using the weighted data provided by Scripps (see update below), we can directly compare the proportion of incorrect or don't know responses to the 9/11 conspiracy and Obama birth certificate questions:

There is an undeniable symmetry to the misperceptions, which skew in the expected partisan directions in both cases. The total proportion of incorrect or don't know responses among Republicans on Obama's citizenship (58%) is comparable to the proportion of comparable responses among Democrats on a 9/11 conspiracy (51%).

The pattern of responses by party is similar if we only include those respondents who directly endorsed the misperception in question (i.e. "very likely" to be a 9/11 conspiracy, Obama not a citizen):

Even under this more stringent standard, 23% of Democrats and 28% of Republicans indicated direct support for the misperception of interest.

In short, using a more appropriate comparison poll, the primary conclusion stands -- both party's bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.

Update 8/10 1:39 PM: I've updated the response totals and graphics based on data provided to me by Scripps that is weighted by race, age, and gender to match Census figures. Applying these survey weights results in slightly higher estimated levels of misperceptions on the 9/11 conspiracy question than I previously reported. This accounts for the discrepancy between the publicly available Scripps data and their published results that I mentioned in the initial version of this post.

Update 8/15 10:39 PM: I just discovered that the first chart had not been updated to reflect the correct weighted response totals. Apologies -- it has been corrected above.

Comments

I think there's a basic flaw in these comparisons. On any "conspiracy theory" event, such as the 9/11 example cited above, or earlier ones such as the JFK assassination or even the FDR complicity in Pearl Harbor, there is no factual way to "disprove the negative," so the theory would have some adherents.

However, in the "birther" issue, the facts are there and obvious and there is no logical debate. Some crazies do believe "conspiracy theories" despite the existence of all facts presented, such as the Obama birth issue and another famous one, whether the moon landing ever occurred. Unlike the unprovable "conspiracies" (9/11, JFK, Pearl Harbor) which persist because there's no hard evidence to show it didn't happen, the birther issue and the moon landing have to go the way of "looney birds," not real conspiracy proponents.

of course there is a basic flaw, its that we even have to make this comparison however as it has been raised there needs to be a quantitative analysis that has some capability of shedding some light on the subject. at least so that there can be a graspable concept that draws a somewhat accurate parallel or dissuades further comparison. the tempest will blow over soon enough and rather like the democrats conspiracy meme, there will be less and less people who subscribe to the notion as time progresses.

This entire post avoids a more basic comparison, for which you don't need to "run the numbers": to believe that Obama is not an American citizen because there is no original birth certificate is to believe in a conspiracy -- but to believe that an American president, of any party, would be complicit in assisting a foreign power attack the country, do $55 billion in damage, and murder 3000 people is... deranged.

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